SAP System Landscape and Architecture

SAP System Landscape

The SAP system landscape is defined as an arrangement of SAP servers. Ideally, there is a landscape with three systems in an SAP environment. A System Landscape ideally consists of a Development Server (DEV), Quality Assurance or Test Server (QAS), a Pre-Production Server (PRE-PROD) and a Production Server (PROD). This is also known as OTAP (Development, Test, Acceptance and Production), where Quality equals Test and Acceptance equals Pre-Production. The bottom line is that pieces of software developed in ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) are implemented in four steps in a controlled way on the productive SAP system, without developers getting in each other's way or productive systems falling down. In some cases, a 'sandbox' server can also be placed in front of the development server to start up a project and set up an initial configuration of the system.

SAP System Landscape

SAP 3-Layer Architecture

The 3-layer Architecture is how SAP has technically organised its data processing. In contrast to the SAP System Landscape above, this 3-layer architecture can change over time.

3-Layer Architecture